The Crack (5 page)

‘A Bunny Girl!' said the scarlet mouth. ‘Baba the Bunny Girl!'

From close to it was possible to see the thin thread of metal that held the strange visitor's lips in place, and the minute, complicated mechanism, as fascinating as a Swiss watch, that operated just under the dimple on the chin and kept it winking merrily.

‘You are the one I am looking for! Come out, my dear.'

Baba glanced up in terror. A smile, spreading at 1.5 millimetres a second, and accompanied by a brisk ticking from the lower jaws, revealed a mouthful of blinding white teeth. On the flat shelf of pink gum the word Pepsodent advertised the product below in forceful frosted writing.

‘Who – who are you?' Baba stammered.

Medea's words went unheard once more as the entire congregation craned towards the extraordinary mechanical woman.

‘My name is Rene Mangrove,' it said.

The papers were held aloft and Baba shrunk back from them.

‘Divorce,' Simon Mangrove's wife intoned. ‘Sign the confession statement.'

Clasped in the iron fingers which lay under the velvety skin of the Al skin graft was a golden fountain pen. The bland brow, unaccustomed to expressions of wonderment or surprise, set itself into a sweet little pattern of wrinkles.

‘Get out of here while you can!' Noreen hissed. ‘Go on! Now!'

Baba found herself on her hands and knees under the pew.
Strong arms pushed her along the floor. She crawled, half conscious with fear, towards the shaft of soupy brown light that poured under the door.

‘Alimony!' came the grating, toneless voice after her. ‘Sign here please. Sign the confession statement now please.'

‘Sisters!' Medea broke in with a great reproachful boom. ‘I command you!'

But by this time Baba had reached the open air, and safety, and was running as fast as her legs would carry her in the direction of the river.

The first person to spy Baba running in panic down Cheyne Walk was Joshua McDougall, who had just a few hours before been rescued from his living tomb in the hall of Sir Max Bowlby's house. All Bowlby's guests – the ladies had jumped from the windows on to bedding – were now rehoused in the empty but stately mansion of Pierre Courvoisier, a Common Marketeer who liked to boast of his possessions on both sides of the Channel. A Frenchman by birth and upbringing, Courvoisier brewed his own English ale as proof that the great traditions of the cognac family in no way impaired his anglomania.

Bowlby and McDougall had made an extensive tour of the lopsided but still elegant eighteenth-century home, had forced down the almost undrinkable beer, and were now resting in the front garden, which ran at a sharp angle down to the cracked road and the evil fumes of the drained river-bed.

‘Just look at that,' McDougall said feebly. ‘A rabbit. Running past.'

Bowlby was too inured by now to feel sorry for his rival in the property field. He knew well that if his own front hall had not removed McDougall's reasoning powers, the shark-like creature would probably have been out and about by now, offering to buy up the ruins.

‘A rabbit in some distress,' McDougall went on. ‘Let's call it in.'

‘Or shoot it?' suggested Pierre Courvoisier from behind them. Only his strong sense of duty and determination to sign up for an enormous shipment of Norman cider had kept him in London over the weekend. He thought sourly of his wife and children enjoying themselves in the country – protected by rolling acres from the rumble of foreign tankers – and, not for the first time, he cursed the fact that his English country-house
was in Wiltshire, south of the river. Why had he not gone
nord
, to
la belle Écosse?

‘It
is
a rabbit,' Bowlby said suddenly. It was a relief to be able to see something through Courvoisier's binoculars instead of the maddening obscurity of the opposite bank. ‘Yes, Peter, why not get a bit of sport? Keep your gun here?'

Courvoisier said he did. Impervious to the moans of displeasure from the ladies, he staggered out into the hanging garden with a Purdy twelve-bore in hand and a deerstalker on his head. Carefully, he took aim.

‘Funny thing,' McDougall said in the thin, crushed voice Bowlby found so irritating. ‘That chap Courvoisier was still sweating over his cider shipment this morning. You'd think all this would have rattled him a little. Besides –'

‘The sign of a good marketeer,' Bowlby snapped. ‘Imperturbable.'

‘Besides,' McDougall went on, ‘who's he going to sell the stuff to?'

‘What?'

A blast from the gun set the drunken lamp-posts in Cheyne Walk swaying. A pigeon, already killed by fallen masonry, exploded into a welter of feathers and blood.

McDougall spelt it out. ‘There's no one left to drink the rotten juice. You see what I mean?'

Baba, hearing the gunfire, dived under a newly formed hedge of tree-roots and turf and yellow bricks that once had been the Old Age Pensioners' Garden at the corner of Old Church Street. How sad, she thought, tears starting to her eyes as she saw the stiff paws of terriers and poodles sticking out from under the rubble. I don't mind anything so much as pets being badly treated. What a beastly war this is!

Nevertheless, Baba was determined to get back to the Playboy Club and get fitted out again. It didn't matter how long it took – or how many miles of dangerous enemy territory she had to cross. She would wait for weeks if necessary, hoping to come across a buried food store or hamburger stall on her way. So when she heard firing, she settled herself in quite comfortably by the roots of a memorial cherry tree, closed her eyes, and tried to relax. So long as that terrifying woman didn't
find her here – but after all, she was well protected. Baba's ears fell forward and she slept.

‘I can see the other side perfectly well,' Lady Bowlby announced. She put down Courvoisier's binoculars and assumed a smug expression. Courvoisier, in a foolhardy but thrusting manner, was exploring the Crack itself after his unsuccessful shooting expedition, and was shouting back inaudible reports to the house.

‘I can hear messages too,' Lady Bowlby added. She gazed mystically at her husband. ‘Aren't you interested in what's going on over there, Max?'

‘Of course I am, darling.' Bowlby was looking around him with fresh eyes. Like sodden banknotes, the crumpled houses of Chelsea and Knightsbridge lay before him. He glanced thoughtfully at McDougall's invalid form, wondering how much the man had worked out already. It had been obvious to him, perhaps, that the combination of the Fair Rents Bill and Courvoisier's high Common Market prices would force the population north of the Thames to seek cheaper accommodation – to go out in the country and grow their own vegetables, even. And that meant a remarkable opportunity for development. Bowlby's mind raced.

‘I can see Cars,' Lady Bowlby said portentously, taking up the binoculars again. ‘Can you, my dear?' She handed the glasses to the heiress, who was still in a state of shock.

‘Oh, yes.' The heiress gave a little sigh of pleasure. She called for her weedy husband and pointed out the orderly stream of traffic that could be descried on the opposite bank.

‘Looks like the sort of simple but luxurious big car we've been looking for for years,' the weedy husband said longingly. ‘Who can they belong to, I wonder?'

As the dim shapes of the cars swam before the eyes of the heiress and her husband, Courvoisier was wading farther and farther out towards the ever-widening Crack.

The mud, so far, was the consistency of chocolate mousse and came only up to the ankle. All the expected objects were lying in it, some looking pathetic and some disgusting, depending on the upbringing of the viewer. Courvoisier trod carefully, aware that a slip and fall into this mire would mean a
lingering death from typhoid. And the hospitals may not be in good shape, he reminded himself grimly. It was important to remember that this expedition – not attempted yet by any of the survivors of the cataclysm – was more momentous even than Captain Scott's. With what tales would he return to his house, where Bowlby and McDougall relaxed indolently, drinking his sherry and planning, in all probability, a property coup to end them all! What if he never did return? Courvoisier searched in his pocket for pen and paper. The last diaries of Captain Courvoisier Cook – and in his mind's eye he saw a hard-cover edition, leather of course, with a golden tassel for a marker.

But in this case the roles of explorer and explored were reversed. For as Courvoisier put a foot forward, his heart thumping and his brain churning out the nineteenth-century language needed to describe the exploit, the Crack visibly and horribly moved towards him.

Courvoisier put his foot back where it had just come from. He had never known, even at the business meetings where he had been impelled to explain his High Prices policy, such a sensation of impending danger.

And the strangest thing about the movement of the Crack was that it appeared to be horizontal. He could see it split like the inane smile on the face of a baby all the way from Battersea Bridge, which lay helplessly across it now, to Southwark. The air was filled with an unpleasant tearing sound which reminded Courvoisier of failed essays of his youth. He looked nervously back at his house, which still bowed deferentially over the river-bed.

Baba was woken from a dream in which two giants, one of them with the sepulchral face of Medea Smith and the other made up of the component parts of Rene Mangrove, fought with each other to the death and finally succeeded in tearing each other apart.

She opened her eyes with a start, to find her legs dangling over the edge of a newly formed crater. A labyrinth of twisted sewage pipes lay below, and she could have sworn she heard the scuffle of rats. With a gasp of horror, she drew back from the jagged invitation to death. If she had slept on …

Lady Bowlby withdrew her chair from the chasm with an exclamation of disgust and moved higher up the slanting lawn with her paraphernalia of binoculars, handbag and chocolates stolen from Pierre Courvoisier's library.

‘I knew he shouldn't have gone out there,' she said, angrily gesturing in the direction of the Frenchman. ‘He's meddling. Upsetting the balance of nature. And now look what he's done.' She peered out at the river-bed. ‘My God. What's that now?' she went on. ‘Max. Max!'

As Lady Bowlby's tremulous voice rang out, Baba ran past and disappeared from sight amongst the boulders of the fallen Embankment. Scrambling down the slabs of torn concrete, she found herself on a primeval beach. Oil and soft mud the colour of French mustard covered her feet, and a strange chill ran up Baba's legs, causing her to tuck her tail between her legs for comfort. She looked desperately ahead. On the far bank, the large grey cars moved monotonously. By the edge of the Crack, a man was measuring the depth of the soil with what seemed to be an old chair-leg. From time to time he straightened and made an entry in a small notebook. Grunts of satisfaction wafted back from him to where Baba stood.

An explorer! A real English gentleman explorer! With a warm flood of relief, Baba waded out to meet Courvoisier. He would look after her! She wondered, inspecting his keen back and square, eager shoulders if he might by some miraculous chance be an old client of hers at the Playboy.

Bowlby and McDougall had just finished their little talk in the study. Traversing the one-in-four gradient of the study floor with difficulty, Bowlby went out in answer to his wife's cries. But he paused at the doorless threshold of the room for one last reassuring word. ‘That's a deal then, Joshua,' he said.

‘It is definitely in our interests to trade with the other side,' McDougall agreed. ‘Our initial problem, of course, will be access.'

‘A bridge,' Sir Max said impatiently.

McDougall gave a faint smile, but said nothing. From the expression on his face, Bowlby wondered if the crushing he had received the previous evening had really affected his brain. Yet his business acumen seemed as sharp as before.

‘For a bridge,' McDougall drawled, ‘you need workers. Isn't that right, Bowlby?'

‘Max! Max!' came from the garden.

Bowlby shrugged irritably. Was McDougall anticipating trouble with the unions? And who said there were any unions left, after a disaster on this scale? Who could tell, for that matter, if there was anyone left except themselves and the owners of all those cars on the other side? For all one knew –

It only hit Bowlby, when he had slid on his stomach down the marble hall and out into the garden, that if there was no one left he was in trouble indeed. It was hard to envisage a world without workers. But surely, he thought with a spurt of confidence, there must be plenty of workers on the other side.

When Courvoisier saw Baba, in spite of his geological investigations and the new spirit of adventure that was so like his happy days in the nursery, a blissful smile spread across his face.

A beautiful girl was coming towards him through the mud. The Venus of the drained river-bed, a nymph in fishnet tights with sweet little ears and tail that reminded Courvoisier of the Beatrix Potter books in his château nursery.

Her hair was long and pale gold. Black lashes fluttered demurely on her cheeks. Courvoisier forgot his wife and children and stepped backwards through the cloying detritus to meet her.

‘I'm Baba,' she said. ‘Haven't I seen you somewhere before?'

It took Thirsk and Harcourt, exhausted as they were, several hours to retrace their footsteps from the river to St George's Hospital. They stopped from time to time at a ruined pub, pulling with their last strength pints of draught bitter from behind the counters and drinking the beer in silent gloom amidst the debris of old cigarette ends and crisp packets.

There was every sign that the pubs had been evacuated suddenly – banquettes and beer-stained tables were strewn with bricks and rubble. Half-finished drinks stood on the bar. Coats still hung by the door. Abandoned handbags lay on the seats; and in one pub a poodle was tied to the leg of a chair.